by Jim Nelson
“Your data goes across the Nexternet marked origin-only,” I said to halt his airs. “Nexternet enforcement protocols prevent anyone from copying your data.”
“Correct.” He clucked the word like a professor complimenting an eager student. “Our guarantees of data integrity reside on the fact that no one can store a copy, alter it, and then present it as an artifact of the Old Internet.”
“But if they had their own copy of the data—"
“Which has never happened,” he reminded me.
“If a hacker stole a copy of the data, they could freely transmit it across the Nexternet.”
Top teeth scraping his bottom lip, finding the subject distasteful, he said, “That is correct. That is a possibility we certainly fear.”
Brill took another data brick from the cart, a blank one. He lined up the fresh brick with the outline of the empty bay. He pushed the brick into the chest of the monolith with one crisp motion. Once connected to the machine’s backplane, the data brick glowed a warm blue color.
“The brick is now resequencing with the backups we maintain around the facility,” Clift said. Brill cleaned up the tools laid out on the floor and pushed the cart out the cell.
“Why isn’t your data read-only?” I asked. Clift grinned and began nodding before I finished, as though he’d heard this question many times. “If you’re preserving the Internet exactly as it was twenty years ago, locked and sealed, why not seal all these data bricks read-only?”
“Because our corpus is incomplete,” he announced with a professorial flair. “It’s not something we broadcast far and wide, but truth be told, we do not hold a complete snapshot of the Internet. For decades, technology companies were scraping the Internet and keeping their own collections. Some did it for profit, some for competitive advantage, and others for their own esoteric reasons. Every few years, we come by knowledge of these private collections. Sometimes the owners approach us, sometimes we approach them. Either way, we acquire these private collections and integrate them into our master snapshot of the Old Internet. It will never be complete. The Internet was simply too vast and too unregulated for any single entity to hold an entire, complete copy from beginning to end.”
“But that’s what you’re attempting.”
“Of course. But for that reason, we cannot seal our copy read-only. The memory of the Old Internet is incomplete, and will be forever. Also—and again, this is not information we share with the general public—on occasion, one of our researchers will detect an omission or mistake in our copy of the Internet. We have to perform fix-ups to ensure the version of the Internet presented to the public appears consistent.”
We emerged from the cell. Clift switched off the service light as we exited. The monolith sat in the rear of the cell, in shadows, an array of blue lights flickering across its chest. We strolled down the row of cells once called Michigan Avenue by the inmates.
“What was Leigh Blessing dismissed for?” I asked.
“She wasn’t dismissed. We requested her leave. As mentioned, it was a philosophical matter."
“Try me. I went to college.” I added, “I'm going to talk with her, whether you like it or not.”
With a touch of impatience, he said, “She found her goals incompatible with the mission of the OIPC. Her aims and our objectives simply did not connect.”
“She was here for two years. It took her that long to figure this out?”
“Her goals evolved,” Clift said. “Our vision has remained steady.”
“And if I talk with her, she’ll tell me the same thing?”
“I can’t tell you what she’ll say. If you locate her.”
“Come again?”
“We’ve tried reaching her at her last known residence in the city,” he said. “No luck.”
I held a hand toward his chest. I grinned out of disbelief. “Now you’re telling me this Blessing woman is missing?"
"I would call her 'incommunicado.'"
"How often have you tried to reach her?”
“I attempted to contact her twice.”
“Why?”
“I was going to ask her outright if she was involved in the security breach.”
“You might have mentioned all this to me before. How old is she? College-aged?”
“Twenty-five, I believe.”
“Attractive?”
“Yes, quite.”
“Was she involved with someone other than her boyfriend? Not here on the island, of course, but on the mainland?”
“Romantically?” Clift constructed a wide enamel smile. “You ask the question as though impossible she could have been involved with me.”
“Are you saying you were—”
Clift laughed and waved me off. “I’m saying I’m a doddering old man who feels thirty years younger in the presence of a beautiful young woman.” He retracted his smile. “But no, I don’t believe she would have even considered a relationship behind her boyfriend's back.”
“What’s his name?”
“Something or another,” Clift said. “He’s almost ten years her senior.”
Brill stood before me. He held my mackintosh open for me, a five-foot-nothing matador presenting a cape the size of a hotel refrigerator. It was a signal my time on the island had expired. I set down my equipment satchel and took the coat from him.
“Mr. Naroy,” Clift said, “do not waste our time searching out Leigh. Look to the Nexternet. See if the data is being sold off through the black market. I believe someone is attempting to profit from the data itself.”
“You don’t think they plan on ransoming the data back to you?”
“I suspect if they can’t find a buyer, they will offer it to me to secure a return on their investment. Because their choice of data seems…targeted, my guess is that they believe a market exists for its contents.”
“Even though this data was freely available to everyone before it was stolen.”
He smiled a smug smile. “And what do you think that suggests, then?” Clift asked me, again, as though he was the professor and I the eager student.
“That your hackers think they can sell the data to a party who wants the data destroyed or forgotten,” I said without hesitation.
Brill offered me my hat. It was still damp from the boat ride over.
Clift said, “Stay in touch, Mr. Naroy.”
The man could be maddening. “If another security breach occurs, my machine will pick it up.” I pulled my hat on tight. It had to be not to lose it in the wind outside. “If anything comes up, let me know.”
“You’ll be the first.” He indicated to Brill to show me out.
“One more thing,” I said. “What exactly did this intruder delete?”
“I can’t show you what’s been erased.” Clift spoke with a smug, barely-hidden grin. He shared a little of his mirth with Brill, who grinned in return. “If it’s been erased, how could I show it to you?”
“The World Wide Web was constructed of hyperlinks,” I said.
“Well, of course,” Clift said, still with the smug smile. Now he was amused with me stating the obvious, as if I fancied myself an auto expert by claiming old-fashioned cars ran on this mysterious fluid called gasoline.
I told him, “If you examine existing web pages with links to the deleted material, we could glean what was erased. Those pages would describe what they were linking to.”
“Yes, yes, of course. We've done that already.” Clift’s smug smile disappeared as he rushed to assure me he knew as much.
That was twice—no, three times—Clift had treated me as a knave. Rubbing one hand over my pruned face, looking down on my sagging body, I guessed he did not speak to everyone like this.
Clift led me and Brill to the research room. The rain ran in fluid sheets down the glass of the reinforced windows. It turned San Francisco’s high-rises into smeary watercolors.
Seated at a computer terminal, Clift demonstrated a surprising deftness with the outdated equipment. Hi
s pre-arthritic fingers danced a ballet on the keyboard. He moved the mouse with clean, delightful precision. So proud of his collection, he explained each step of his journey to me and Brill, such as demonstrating how to use an old-fashioned web browser to search the Old Internet.
“Most people prefer to use a memex,” he said. “I still enjoy the old ways.”
His demonstration was wasted on me. I’d grown up on the Internet. As a teenager, it was my window to the world. If it wasn’t on the Internet, it didn’t exist for me. You don’t have a forty-plus year career in computer technology without learning how a web browser works. No, Clift’s lesson on browsing the Internet was solely for Clift’s satisfaction.
“Here’s a summary of web pages hyperlinking to the deleted material,” he announced. “Almost all the deletions were of a high-definition video released in late 2010 and propagated widely throughout 2011 and 2012. Hundreds of thousands of copies were made, including many modified versions of it. Several satires and spoofs were produced as well. All copies and imitations are now missing.”
I leaned down, one arm on the beech table, to allow my aging eyes a chance to discern the pixelated text on the old-style display. Tens of thousands of web pages were listed in Clift’s search results. Whatever had been deleted was immensely popular. A capsule summary beneath each link explained what the page itself held, along with capture times, archival information, provenance, digital signatures, and so forth.
A sickening lump formed in my throat. My stomach tightened. This was a grave, stark list.
“The video was a film titled Detachment,” I heard Clift say. “Apparently, it was quite the sensation in its time.”
I knew all about Detachment. I knew because I played the lead role.
5.
My involvement with Detachment began nearly thirty years earlier, sometime in March of 2010. It happened at the Palace Hotel bar & grill. That morning in 2038, I stood over Aggaroy’s dead body across the street from the Palace Hotel. That’s the kind of small town San Francisco is. Living here for years feels like walking in circles. Every day you find yourself on the same streets and the same sidewalks, sidestepping the same potholes in the crosswalks and striding past the same people who refuse to look you in the eye or acknowledge your presence. Every corner is a neuron holding a memory, and the city is a massive brain holding all those memories. Every day here is déjà vu: different but the same.
I was drinking whiskey sours that March night in 2011. The bartender garnished them with thick orange slices and oversized maraschino cherries on plastic skewers. My clumsy plump hands were greasy from the comped snack mix. My fingerprints smudged the sides of my cocktail glasses with its gray-green wasabi powder.
I’d been sitting at that bar stool for two hours. I might as well have been sitting there for two years. It was late in the night and the restaurant behind me was overflowing with banker suits from the Financial District. A sales conference was in town and the Midwesterners were ordering chops and steaks with their beers and whiskey shots. A giant landscape hangs on the wall behind the bar, a Maxfield Parrish painting of the Piped Piper leading the town’s children into the wilderness. In my bleary state, I could not help but study those young faces. They were so eager to be led. Being led means giving someone else power, but it also means membership, joining a club, having a family. These children had no idea what awaited them and they were excited. The pied piper was a movement, a crusade, a shining path leading off the side of a cliff.
I’d not spoken to anyone at the bar save for the occasional sign language one makes to a bartender to get another drink. The whiskey sours did not blunt my melancholy. They only attuned it, sharpened its lines. They made the bleary truth of my life crystallize in a parade of doubles glasses and fruit slices.
A fresh cocktail was set before me. My bear paw of a hand found the sides of the glass. The wasabi dust on my fingertips left grey cakey smudges on the bar. When it touched the pristine glass, it dirtied it as well. I got my oversized lips all over the rim. I made the glass greasy with peanut oil. I soiled the air around me with my breath, rank with wasabi and halitosis.
Lost in my greasy inebriated little world, the woman surprised me with a tap on the shoulder. With my reaction times impaired, I weeble-wobbled in my chair to swivel and face her.
“Are you an actor?” she demanded.
The young woman stared at me with a determined face framed by straight black hair cut in a tight bob. Stern coal-black bangs made a Euclidean horizon across her forehead. In that determined face was the foreshadowing of a proposition about to be laid out. In that face was the difference between thinking the world was your oyster and thinking one oyster was not enough. I forget names. I do not forget faces, and I remember that face vividly thirty years later.
"You look like an actor," she said.
I needed a moment to process it. "I am not."
"Has anyone told you that you carry yourself like an actor?"
You have to be able to carry yourself before you can carry yourself like an actor. I shook my head, my neck loose and flimsy. "Never heard that before."
"You have an actor’s demeanor about you." It was not praise. It was a forceful statement of unquestionable fact.
"I don't even know what that means."
"Have you ever thought about acting? On film?"
I was tipsy and dumbfounded.
“I’m Cline,” she said. “I’m a director.” Her hand clamped mine like a train hookup taking hold of the caboose.
The white strap of a bike messenger bag ran diagonally across her black long-sleeved death metal shirt. She looked like a crossing guard you wouldn't trust your kids with. She whipped around the satchel and produced a thin sheaf bound along the spine with tape. On the cover in bold letters, all caps and centered, was a title: DETACHMENT. The typeface was huge, 36-point or so. Whatever they named the font, it should've been called Drippy Horror Gothic.
“I’m producing my next movie,” Cline told me. “You should audition for the lead.”
Beneath the title printed in a normal typeface was BY CLINE MAYALL.
“A movie?” I asked.
“I really would like you to be a part of this,” she said.
“Audition?” My thick tongue manipulated the word like Gomer Pyle handling alien technology. “I’m a computer programmer.”
“I plan on submitting my movie to the independent film festival this autumn.” She stepped back and sized me up. “You are the man I need.”
“I think you’ve got the wrong guy.”
She waved for the bartender. “Let me buy you a drink. Can I buy you a drink?”
I motioned to the cocktail before me. “Just starting a fresh one.” Before she returned the twenty-dollar bill to the pocket of her black denim jeans, I added, “You can buy my next one, though.”
The bartender accepted her money. He set an overturned shot glass before me, my marker, my voucher, my ticket to ride.
“Are you having one?”
“I'm fine.”
I drank my whiskey sour while watching her over the rim. It was a moment when she didn’t realize I was watching her. While I drank, she looked me up and down the way a car buyer evaluates a used car: how does it look from this side, how does it look from that side, what wear-and-tear can be lived with, what wear-and-tear will need immediate attention.
“I’m seeking an everyman for my movie,” she told me. “You’ll be a strong, confident older man in a relationship with a younger woman.”
I’m only twenty-seven, I thought. I estimated her to be twenty or so, even if she was taking the role of my superior. Some art school notion of auteur theory, the forceful director commanding their way to cinematic glory.
Although I was pretty well heated, I had enough sense to remind myself how I looked to her. I was overweight, lumpy and pear-shaped, with a dog’s face and a splotchy complexion and a bad three-month-old haircut. My ears fanned out like satellite dishes, one farther than the ot
her, as though my head couldn’t make up its mind. She was not interested in me for my photogenic qualities.
“Why’s it called Detachment?” I nodded toward the script.
She stuffed it back in her messenger bag. “I’ll audition you next Wednesday,” she said. “I’m going to put you on the couch with this pretty young thing. Your costar is a blonde with the biggest eyes you’ve ever seen. She’s done some modeling. She’s also a competitive swimmer,” as though that would cure me of any doubts I harbored.
“What do you mean, ‘couch’?”
“The casting couch,” she said. “I need to see how you two look on-camera. I also need to see you two in bed together. We’ll do some test shots in the bedroom.”
I smelled it, and I smelled it right away. “How much?” The words tumbled from my mouth. “How much are we talking about here?”
“I can’t pay you, unfortunately.” Cline stepped closer, fire-hot gaze bearing straight into me. “This film is financed from my own pocket. It’s an indie, you understand. But it’ll be a great opportunity for you.”
“I mean, are you asking me to pay you?” Her story smelled of a scam, a confidence trick from a ragtime-era movie. A young thing takes the traveling salesman back to her room. Her seething red-eyed brother barges in. The salesman pays him off to avoid a beat-down. Wash, rinse, repeat with the next mark.
“Of course not,” she said. “No one pays to be in a movie. That’s absurd.”
She returned to describing my putative co-star, a lithe blonde who’d modeled bathing suits for Macy’s downtown. My payment, as I gathered, was a chance to pretend this woman was my girlfriend—a Hollywood-style couch read, a make-believe roll in the hay. She produced a black-and-white head shot of the woman. She was as blonde as the nation of Sweden. On the reverse, the girl posed in a plain white bikini that could make time stop.
“What happens in this film?” I said. “What is this movie about?”
“I’ll explain after the audition.” She pushed a business card in my hand, her name and email address. “We’ll have plenty to talk after that.”
The business card listed her as Filmmaker. On the back, she’d already written a home address. I recognized the street. It was in Bernal Heights. Beneath the address she’d written Wed. 2pm